Abstract
ABSTRACT: Among the prized possessions of Robert Peattie, a young Scottish schoolteacher who had emigrated to New Zealand in 1875, was an abridged edition of Jamieson's Scots Dictionary . Rather than treating his dictionary as a passive reminder of the life he had left behind, Peattie actively added to its information, filling the margins of his copy with evidence of how Scots words recorded by Jamieson were being used half a century later. His annotations are part memoir, part diary, offering vignettes from Peattie's boyhood in Fife, as well as recording the continuing use of Scots among his fellow emigrants in Otago. They are therefore a form of lexicographical life-writing, where headwords serve as prompts for memory, both from earlier life and recent experience. Peattie's work was given new life in the twentieth century, when his annotated copy was consulted by the editors of the Scottish National Dictionary . This paper analyzes the style and content of Peattie's annotations from his copy, which is now in Glasgow University Library, and draws on newspaper and other contemporary sources to place Peattie's work in the context of attitudes to Scots among the Scottish emigrant community in nineteenth-century New Zealand.
Published Version
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